Well, for one thing, IEEE-757 was a significant improvement on the vendor-specific ways of handling floating point that it replaced ( https://people.eecs.berkel

Well, for one thing, IEEE-757 was a significant improvement on the vendor-specific ways of handling floating point that it replaced ( https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/ieee754status/754story.html https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/ieee754status/754st... ). I wasn't a big fan of floating point until I worked with a former college professor who had taught astrophysics. When possible, he preferred to use respected libraries that would give accurate results fast. But when he had to implement things himself, he didn't always necessarily want the fastest or the most accurate implementation; he'd intentionally make and document the tradeoffs for his implementation. He could analyze an algorithm to estimate the accumulated units in the last place error ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_in_the_last_place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_in_the_last_place ), but he realized when that wasn't necessary.